Acer Aspire One D250

This summer’s must-have for every self-respecting web user has to be a netbook. These cut-down laptops don’t have the size or specification of their bigger counterparts, but they’re small, light, cute and convenient to carry around.

Features
The two things that stand out on this device are its design and its screen. The case is slick and attractive, with the screen unit lifted on short stilts so it can wrap around the battery – the thickest part of the unit. When you close it up, the netbook is about an inch thick and will easily slip into a bag. The interior is black but you get a choice of external colours – black, white, blue or red.

The screen itself uses Acer’s stunning CrystalBrite technology, so you get very crisp whites and dark blacks. We toned the brightness and contrast down to conserve battery life but the screen remained readable and clear – a great advantage for a little laptop.

Performance
Netbooks such as this compromise on performance to allow for their smaller size. With Intel’s N270 or N280 Atom processor at its heart, this netbook doesn’t have enough power to let you play games on the go, but that’s hardly the point. Instead, you’ve got a system that can run Windows XP competently. The battery life on our three-cell model gave us less than three hours, though we were performing a virus scan in the background and had Wi-Fi turned on throughout. You could squeeze more life out of it by turning things off. Alternatively, go for a six-cell battery model, which Acer claims will last up to six hours.

Ease of use
We had a minor niggle with the keyboard on the device and, while we weren’t struggling to hit any keys, we found the casing around the space bar was raised too high. Getting your thumb in a comfortable position meant leaving your other fingers hovering above the wrong keys, which made regularly using the spacebar uncomfortable. It’s not a deal breaker but it’s worth considering this drawback if you plan to do a lot of writing on the netbook. However, the installed Windows XP operating system should be familiar enough to most people. Bear in mind that, as with most netbooks, there’s no DVD drive so you might find it hard to install your favourite software unless you can download it or have access to a USB DVD drive.

Value for money
Looks aren’t everything but this dinky netbook has them in spades. To Acer’s credit, it hasn’t put that much of a premium on it – similar specified netbooks we reviewed in our Group Test at the end of last year were only slightly cheaper, and didn’t have anything like the screen quality of this model.

Verdict
Typing is an issue on all netbooks – the smaller keyboard size means you’re cramping up your fingers and this particular model could do with increasing the size of the lowered section in front of the space bar. The rest of it is near perfect though, with options for beefing up the memory (it’ll take up to 2GB) and battery. Best of all is the size of the unit and the CrystalBrite screen though, which will cut a dash on your travels and gives the device an expensive air that isn’t reflected in its very reasonable price.